Vets backstabbed by corporate oligarchy

The Veterans of Foreign Wars has issued a “call to action” to its 2 million members, according to this Military.com article, asking them to plead with Congress to spare military and veterans benefits as a bipartisan committee looks to trim $1.2 trillion from the federal budget.

Why soldiers have to beg their own government to keep its promises is another story. One that begins and ends with its apparent takeover in a bloodless coup d’etat by business leaders with a legal obligation to maximize profits. These business interests are raiding the federal treasury every chance they get and creating regulations that help the few and hurt the many, while dodging their fair share of taxes.

The painful truth is that military service is about as pure an example of socialist activity as you’re going to find anywhere in the U.S. – soldiers literally put their individual needs second to those of the many. They risk their lives for the greater good, not for salaries they may never get to spend.

That heroic attitude is diametrically opposed to the “greed is good” mantra of savage capitalists like the Koch Brothers, who are strictly out for themselves. It’s also one of the reasons that the recent appearance by&nbsp; Sgt. Dakota Meyer (above left), the first living Marine to earn the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War, at the New York Stock Exchange was so bitter for those of us who understand what’s really going on.

Meyer is nobody to the traitors – I mean traders – on Wall Street. They don’t share his heroic values and sense of service to society. They’re parasites. That’s why appearing beside him is so useful to posers like money pundit Jim Cramer.

Wall Street used Meyer just like they use all of us. He probably got a couple dollars. Big deal. It’s one pay-day against a lifetime of knowing exploitation by people who make zeros for a living and contribute nothing tangible to Society except their greed and desire to exploit the rest of us.

As a construction worker, Meyer would have been more at home among the Occupy Wall Street protesters who are not allowed within a block of the exchange.

Sadly, military veterans like Meyer don’t have much clout these days in Washington, D.C., despite their service to this nation. Clout is measured by political donations and lobbyist dollars in our nation’s capital.

Lobbyists facilitated this bloodless coup d’etat by Big Business. They’re the ones who figured out how to use money to neuter the middle class electorate.

That’s a statistically insignificant presence in a lobbying industry that employed 13,000 people in 2010 and generated $3.5 billion in revenue (above left). Halliburton Energy Co., which employed Bush’s vice president (below left) as its CEO and chairman for many years, had seven lobbyists on the payroll and spent about $500,000 during the same time period.

Their job?

Pretty much the fleecing of America and the subversion of representative democracy. They’re not patriots risking their lives to defend the American way of life like Meyer, unless you think the economic enslavement of your fellow man is the American way. More like “Sonderkommandos” trying to ensure their own survival by betraying their fellow American wage-earners.

Look folks, companies like Halliburton and nations like China employ political lobbyists in DC to influence our government, by stealing the clout of average voters. It’s that simple. They amplify their influence by reducing your influence as a voter and they’re great at it – well worth the money if you have it.

The Sonders – I mean lobbyists – in DC have done such a super job that tax money which otherwise might have been spent on social programs for future generations has been consumed more than 20 years out. Former President George W. Bush spent that money.

The former Texas CEO gave it away to the wealthy via tax breaks and transferred it to huge corporations, like Halliburton, via inflated military contracts.&nbsp;

Then Geedub turned around and handed the bill for that orgy of irresponsible spending to Barack Obama.

The really amazing aspect of it all is that the lobbyists are so good that they’ve got some people convinced that it’s all Obama’s fault. And now they want to cover the shortfall on the backs of wounded veterans.

The United States spent $3 for every $2 it took in during fiscal year 2011, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO estimates that the federal deficit was $1.3 trillion, or 8.6 percent of our gross domestic product (GDP).

Prior to the disastrous Geedub presidency, deficits had never surpassed 6 percent of GDP, except during The Civil War, World War I and World War II.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, annual deficit spending in FY2011 actually surpassed that recorded during WWII, according to The Weekly Standard. The entire Obama presidency has been spent trying to straighten out the mess he inherited, and it’s a safe bet that the problems created by the economic illiteracy of the Bush regime will continue even past 2016.

The VFW opposes any Congressional attempt to balance the budget on the backs of military retirees and disabled veterans. The organization implored members, their families and friends to contact lawmakers immediately.

“It is critical that our voices not be lost in the ongoing budget debate that seems to now equate national service and sacrifice with the size of health care premiums,” said Richard L. DeNoyer, a retired Marine and head of the VFW, told AP. “The `people programs’ inside the [departments] are expensive because it takes people to fight our wars, and with less than 1 percent of our citizens currently in uniform, any degradation of these hard fought-for programs will break faith with those who sacrifice the most.”

There’s a wonderful lesson here for the men and women of the New York Police Department, who have been arresting the patriotic Americans of The Occupy Wall Street movement trying to save everyone’s collective ass. And that lesson is that all your boot-licking means nothing to Wall Street. Zero.

You’re equipment to them, to be depreciated and replaced. Just like the soldiers that are about to get screwed.

In case you’re wondering what a “Sonderkommando” is – they’re the World War II concentration camp inmates who collaborated with the Nazis. The Sonders (right) beat their fellow prisoners, pulled gold teeth from their skulls, and tossed their bodies in ovens in a bid to curry favor with their captors.

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The Cynical Times is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news and satire organization devoted to the faltering middle class, which specializes in painful truths. It was founded in 2011 to expose the knowing lies and sins of omission of the Predatory 1 Percent, their political hookers in Washington, D.C., and the paid propagandists of the mainstream news media.